I confess I dislike this contention among the various literary forms--poetry, fiction, history, biography, drama and essay--as to which of them is nearest grace. It is not the form that seizes the truth, but the imagination of the artist working through the form. Imagination and the sense of life are as necessary to a good historian as to a good novelist. Artists need not quarrel for precedence for any particular art in a world in which all the great books that have so far been written could be packed into a little room. At the same time, it is well that a novelist should take his art as seriously as Aristotle took the art of poetry. It often requires an exaggeration to bring the truth into prominence. And, in any case, the exaggerations of the novelists in this respect have as a rule been modest compared to the exaggerations of the poets. If Mr. Conrad is to be believed, however, the novelist is the rival, not only of the historian, but of the moralist. He warmly denies that he is a didactic writer, but at least he holds that in all great fiction a moral is implicit that he who runs may read: That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation. One would have to think hard in order to fit _Tristram Shandy_ and _The Pickwick Papers_ into this--if the word is not forbidden--formula. Perhaps it is a formula more applicable to tragic than to comic writing. Mr. Conrad as critic often seems to be defining his own art rather than the art of fiction in general. He knows what he himself is aiming at in literature, and he looks for the same fine purpose in his fellow-writers. We feel this when he requires of the novelist “many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope.” This, he declares, “is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth.” “To be hopeful in an artistic sense,” he adds, “it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so.” There surely speaks the author of _Youth_ and _Typhoon_. And the image of the same author may be seen in the remark that “I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he”--the novelist--“should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues.” Mr. Conrad cannot escape from the shadow of his own genius. It falls on every page of his criticism as fatally as any formula, though more vividly. His protest against what has been called “stylism” is simply the protest of one who did not approach the art of literature through that door. He is praising not merely Maupassant but his ideal self when he tells us: